Performance & Load Testing Flashcards
7 cards from real Software Testing practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Performance & Load Testing flashcards as text
What does scalability testing primarily verify about a system?
Answer: That the system can accommodate increasing workloads by adding resources
Scalability testing confirms that a system can expand its capacity—by adding CPUs, memory, or nodes—to meet growing demand without proportional performance degradation.
In performance testing, what is a 'bottleneck'?
Answer: A component or resource that constrains overall system throughput
A bottleneck is the single component—CPU, memory, database, or network—whose limited capacity prevents the rest of the system from performing better.
What scenario does spike testing specifically evaluate?
Answer: System behavior when load suddenly surges and then drops sharply
Spike testing simulates sudden, dramatic increases in concurrent users followed by an abrupt drop, evaluating how the system handles and recovers from unexpected traffic bursts.
Why is it important to calibrate 'think time' accurately in a load test script?
Answer: To ensure simulated delays between actions reflect actual user behavior patterns
Accurate think time calibration ensures the load pattern reflects real user pacing, preventing an unrealistically aggressive or lenient load that would skew test results.
What is Chaos Engineering and how does it relate to performance and resilience testing?
Answer: The practice of deliberately injecting failures into systems to test resilience under real-world conditions
Chaos Engineering, pioneered by Netflix, intentionally introduces failures (network latency, instance termination) in production to identify weaknesses and validate that systems remain resilient.
Which performance testing approach is used to identify the 'knee of the curve'—the point where additional load causes disproportionate performance degradation?
Answer: Incremental load testing
Incremental load testing gradually steps up concurrent users while monitoring response time and error rate, making the 'knee'—where metrics spike sharply—clearly visible in the results.
Why is resource utilization monitoring (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network) considered essential alongside performance metric collection?
Answer: It helps correlate system resource consumption with observed performance behavior to identify root causes
Correlating resource utilization with performance metrics reveals why response times are slow—for example, whether CPU saturation or memory exhaustion is the root cause of degradation.